Hurricane Season’s Coming! Are You Ready?

Ramon Ray & the Smallbiztechnology.com Team

Jul. 4, 2012, 8:00 AM

If there's one thing scarier than having your company's IT resources broken into, it's probably the possibility of a hurricane cutting off power and Internet communications that are crucial for your operations. Hurricanes have a knack for destroying businesses and even the most robust facility will not get away without a scratch.

That said, you need to start thinking about how to protect your IT infrastructure especially if your business depends on it to a moderate degree. You might run a tight ship, but a single tiny hole in that ship could send it sinking at the first sign of a high wave. This is why you need to invest in clear-cut solutions that offer you the most reliable security against natural disasters. Investing in these solutions should be top-priority, next to paying your insurance.

Here are some pointers about what you should do to be ready when disaster strikes:

Gather emergency contacts - At any point when the power's out, you need to get connected with people who can help you get your business back online. This information is normally stored on a digital device. You should write it down instead and put it up on your fridge or somewhere you'll find the information quickly.

Discover what you have and think about how to get it back - There are tons of things you take for granted every day that might not appear again at the event of a disaster. Make sure you know what you'd possibly lose in a hurricane and find ways of getting backup systems underway. If you run your website locally, have a mirror hosted in another location on the planet just in case. The best solution would be to have a shared hosting plan set up in another continent. If you have heavy traffic from your own country, though, just make sure the server hosts your site in another part of the same country. Land lines sometimes go down, so make sure you have cell phone numbers for all your employees, and they all have your cell number as well.

Gather your financial resources - It's important to save for a rainy day, but it's even more important to save up for a hurricane. That said, you should have enough money left over to run your business for an entire month, maybe more. If you can't make any back orders through your ordering platform because the Internet's down in your location, that could mean the end of your business if you don't have the money to support running costs and pay the bills without any revenue.

Get as much data as possible on the Cloud - While you're still thinking about what to do to prevent issues in your IT infrastructure during a disaster, you have to think about adequate recovery solutions. Services like Quorum Hybrid Cloud and Symform specialize in data backup and recovery. You might encounter physical damage to your infrastructure that results in data loss. Never forget that you must account for this when hurricanes come strolling down your avenue. Be sure to also adopt server virtualization, a service that allows you and other users to take control of a remote server when in need.

Now, test it! - If you think you're ready for a disaster, turn off your entire IT infrastructure, recover your data into dummy systems, and disconnect your landlines. Try this on an off-day for a few hours and see if everything is working as it should. Check your employee reactions and see if they're managing well under the circumstances. You need to assess the performance of your disaster preparedness to see if it will be effective when the real thing blows through your shores.

While you're concerned about keeping the roof over your head while a 100+ mph wind is roaring and throwing things at it, you might forget the little boxes and bleeping lights that form the bread and butter of your business. Don't wait for the calm before the storm to secure your IT infrastructure!